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CHAPTER 2 THE SUCCESS FACTORS OF MILLIONAIRE ENTREPRENEURS

school grades, rather than see them waste their vacation time.
Therefore, the market for holiday programs was booming and
extremely profitable.

As the years went by, schools themselves began to arrange
more holiday activities for their students. Now, it is not
uncommon for a child to go back to school almost every other
day, during the school holidays, for makeup classes, sports
competitions, club meetings, enrichment programs, excursions
and so on. Did this affect the sign ups for my holiday programs?
You bet! Now parents were finding it increasing difficult to
send their children to my five-day programmes, as it would
clash with their school activities.

This trend affected many of my competitors and forced
many of them to scale back their business and lose money.
Some even had to close down. Guess what most of these
business owners were doing? Blaming! They were blaming
the school policies and activities for destroying their lucrative
holiday businesses.

I knew that the way to succeed was to again take responsibility
that the holiday programs I offered were not as appealing to
the market as previously. Instead of fighting the schools, I
decided to create a ‘Schools Division’ and assemble a sales
team to market my program directly to the schools.

Since the schools are getting their students to go back for
enrichment programs, I might as well be the company that
runs these programs on behalf of the school. Again, the
business decision was a highly lucrative one. Within 4 years,
one in four schools in Singapore engaged my program for
their students (a 25% market share) and again the revenue I
generated from the sheer volume was much more than what

SECRETS OF BUILDING MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR BUSINESSES 45